THE concept of heritage is today caught between the everyday theories of culture and the claims of esoteric expertise. As it veers to the latter, it becomes bureaucratic and technocratic. Yet heritage is a polysemic word that needs to be articulated in a variety of contexts. Its meaning must be understood in terms of its polysemic power rather than frozen into legalistic dictionary definitions. Like many words associated with the nation state, heritage like security, has become instrumentalist and technocratic losing its everyday vitality as part of the mnemosyme of a people. Heritage thus is a concept that needs to be rescued: first, from the jingoism of the nation state which conscripts it for identity formation; second, from a bureaucracy that forges it into a technical entity closer to the sense of property; and third, from a casual populism that sees it as part of a tourist fixation.

To return the idea of heritage to its lifeworlds, one has to state what heritage is not. Heritage is not a commodity. It is not a property. It is not an extension of nation state identity. Heritage needs a language which is less economic, less expert oriented, combining the physical and metaphysical so that it retains its civilizational and vernacular quality.

To standardize the idea of heritage is to create a new conformity, a new world in uniform. Heritage has to speak the language of the commons, to create a deeper sense of trusteeship and belonging. To start with the specificities of heritage would be to lose the wider context, the ecological imagination which turns heritage into a life-giving word. Heritage does not preserve the dead and forgotten but is an attempt to invent a living sense of memory, of continuity, of tradition. Heritage belongs to a commons of memory. It is the livingness of heritage that defines it. Thus in deconstructing heritage, one has to re-emphasize the memory elaborated, outline a different connectivity to the past where heritage is not only an object but a heuristic, a formula for reconstruction, invention and continuity.

Heritage cannot be the dead wood of the past but the heuristics of invention for alternative possibilities of the future. The idea of heritage evokes the classic, but the term itself has a casual illiteracy about it, a philistinism that allows people to vandalize it. Heritage is a form of trusteeship and caring for a world which exists only in its bare outlines. To preserve heritage in a bureaucratic sense is to narrow our sense of trusteeship. Heritage is a form of caring which keeps alive the theoretical, epistemic and even material foundations of a fading society. Heritage is history but one has to go beyond the textuality, the materiality of history to capture that sense of kinship with a different time and an affinity for it. Heritage thus is trusteeship not ownership, caring not caretakership, sharing not possession. It cares for the object and the knowledge systems and cosmologies that brought such forms into being.

A manifesto of heritage thus has to re-embed heritage within the critical politics of the enlightenment where heritage has become a sentimental, humanistic, anthropocentric form of thinking. Ironically in its very search for continuity, heritage becomes lifeless. Heritage while recollecting the past has to be a life giving hypothesis, a heuristic for the future, a part of the future as commons. Thus time, memory, a relationship to the past has to be located within the language of liberty, equality and fraternity.

 

One has to comment on the architectonic of such a problematic. Deeply it is a consequence of an enlightenment framework of knowledge and politics. The basic triangle of political thought centres around the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity. Western thought has been more knowledgeable and impressive on the ideas of liberty and equality. Whether one thinks of Marx, Bentham, Locke or Tom Paine, their politics has been more about the politics of liberty and equality. Possibly because of the dreams of universalism, both difference and diversity have acquired an innate secondariness, being more part of the problem rather than the problematic of political thought.

 

The idea of fraternity, plurality and diversity have been poor cousins of western political thought, conceptual country bumpkins without the universalist sheen or cosmopolitanism that the ideas of liberty and equality convey. As a result, minority politics is more about the civics of good behaviour or at least an outline of a protective framework of rights. There is narrowness to such an idea of citizenship by definition. It is an identity politics that limits the imagination to the current grammar of politics without creating what the famous Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis called the imaginaries of thought. If the imagination is contemporary, conventional, defined and bounded, the imaginary encompasses the horizon of the unexpected, the emergent, and the domain of surprise suggesting the fertility of the new. It brings a new sense of agency into minoritarian politics.

The genealogy of diversity has to modify the current readings of the enlightenment dream of universalism and rationalism. A dream of universalism will always be there but one has to be cautious of universalizing the recalcitrant. The process of universalizing cannot be hegemonic when it confronts the incommensurable. Universalism as a model of unity cannot be reductive, atomistic, creating a situation where the whole is less than the sum of the parts. It was the Victorian biologist Alfred Wallace, one of the great theorists of diversity, who warned that a science at a moment of domination could turn coercive, corroding the roots of its own creativity. Wallace called up on scientists to invent alternatives, allow for the creativity of difference so science remains alert, supple and robust to new possibilities. Diversity becomes a cognitive substrate for such a world.

Difference, says Wallace, creates reciprocity and cooperation rather than a Huxleyian world of fang and claw. Diversity in that sense makes cognition less promethean, more sensitive to limits and yet provides a different commons of creativity, where the mystery of the whole celebrates the magic of the parts, where the whole is never totally knowable, where the parts can trigger new cosmologies and worldviews. Democracy needs both a new dialogue and a new dialectic between the universalizing and pluralizing. Parts acquire a new legitimacy as they are not provincialized, hegemonized, localized, but are embedded in a new cosmopolitan intimacy of part and whole. The vernacular has a new transformative power compared to the limits of a self-defeating provincialism.

 

The sadness of contemporary politics is that we have created morbid unities around mechanical uniformities. One must confess that liberty and equality often get trapped in individualism or uniformity. The poverty of mechanical unities like the nation state is something that diversity challenges. Diversity becomes an antidote to the impoverishment of current unities. A more creative and celebratory theory of diversity is essential to combat the forces of genocide or even the extinction of species or languages. Diversity can no longer be a theory of mourning of loss for a language lost or a people gone extinct. It is this metaphysical pathos that one must remove from a creation myth of diversity. Only then can a new notion of heritage come alive. Heritage cannot be anchored on technocratic ideas of sustainability or development. The idea of heritage then becomes an add-on to these systems.

The idea of the margin has to encompass both space and time, include the marginal, the ethnic, the minority, the indigenous, the alien, the alternative, the dissenting, the defeated, the ghettoized, the informal, the scapegoat, the eccentric, the here-tic and the radical. India must see itself as the compost heap and the festival of the margins where even the last Marxist and the last Victorian have a rightful place.

 

Pluralizing the margins is the first act of diversity as trusteeship, because diversity is a trusteeship of differences. A society which has 150,000 varieties of rice is trustee to 150,000 ways of cooking, dreaming and myth. Such a trusteeship should become an everyday act of civics, where every school and society group and community takes upon itself to keep a craft, a language, or a species alive as a way of life and as a lifeworld. Such a notion of diversity challenges liberalism, market and development at several levels. Firstly, an idea of heritage located in diversity as a theory of memory is not rote memory but an inventive memory that keeps alive a tradition. One does not museumize an object but reinvents new ecologies and heuristics for it.

Ananda Coomaraswamy was right when he asked the Indian national movement to fight a guerrilla war against the museum which he deemed ‘smelt of death and formaldehyde’. Museums embalm life to encourage forgetting while memory is active, open-ended and inventive. Any tradition will testify to this. To guard against a rote reduction of memory to a mechanical system, memory needs a new social contract where a society as social contract has to be reworked thrice, across the terrains of the oral, the textual and the digital, recognized not in terms of a developmental linear sequence but in terms of the power of their simultaneity. The plurality of time rather than the hegemony of history or development becomes axiomatic to a discourse on diversity.

 

One senses the irony of a contemporary classic of humanitarianism like the Brundtland Report on sustainability which has an impoverished notion of time and is, therefore, conceptually and politically disabled to talk about sustainability. Sustainability demands the continuity of plurality over time, allowing for a multiplicity of lifeworlds to live and evolve in a multiplicity of times. A trusteeship of memory, of diversity is then a responsibility that goes beyond the current ideas of triage of societies, the daily obsolescence of craft, and the erasure which violence demands from memory as a perpetual act of extraction.

The liberal notion of tolerance appears lazy as it confronts the violence of today. Tolerance is asymmetrical. It allows the other to coexist but in a parallel or lesser world. Tolerance does not demand mutual engagement, reciprocity or hospitality. It was the South African philosopher, A.C. Jordan, who stated that we do not merely accept the alien and stranger. Plurality and hospitality go beyond meek acceptance. Jordan demanded that we invent new notions of the stranger to sustain the inventiveness of our communities. The liberal sociology of George Simmel and Robert Park’s Chicago school recognized the presence of the stranger, the marginal man, the alien, the migrant as categories, but one needs to build them into the very ontology of being, not as something which is here today and gone tomorrow.

In a cognitive and social sense, we need a different ecology of concepts that go beyond the logic of hierarchy and centralization. C.S. Holling and his Swedish-American team of ecologists recently posited the idea of panarchy. Panarchy relativizes the idea of hierarchy, of the same communicative order being relevant from top to down. It argues that each level of scale is a different life system, demanding a different solution as a different idea of knowledge. The capital and the panchayat may be tied by hierarchical or a panarchic relation. Panarchy makes the ecology of plurality more feasible and accessible, allowing for different solutions to different levels of the problem.

 

Panarchy sets the ground for dialogue in a deeper sense of the term. The dialogue of knowledges, of medical systems, of religions, has to be a critical part of the democratic imagination. One has to remember the theologian Raimon Panikkar’s wise words that dialogue is not the eminent domain of theologians. Dialogue is neither ecclesiastical, theological, but a conversation of faiths, a pilgrimage into the understanding of another faith, which firstly strengthens one’s own sense of faith. Dialogue challenges conversion and seeks to substitute it with conversation and communication. Being at home is more important than any artificial idea of homecoming (ghar wapsi) that fundamentalism seeks to maintain as necessary today.

Dialogue demands a deeper sense of hermeneutics. As Panikkar aptly puts it, ‘Hermeneutics is a method of overcoming the distance between a knowing subject and an object to be known, once the two have been estranged.’ Hermeneutics thus becomes an effort to rework the estrangement between cultures. It demands a proactive sense of translation, of new kinds of brokerage between cultures. Dialogue does not look for simple equivalences, or superficial similarities but for a truth beyond current ideas of logos. A dialogue of religions becomes an essential part of any plural democracy.

 

One realizes that within the constitutional frameworks of today, the idea of rights generates a sense of citizenship and survival. The idea of rights, both political and economic, is one of the great achievements of the enlightenment encompassing both the French and Socialist Revolutions. Yet there is vulnerability, a limit to rights as it proliferates and becomes an overworked Stakhanovite term. Firstly, rights in guaranteeing entitlements rarely looks at the content or the claim. Ziauddin Sardar puts it deftly when he explains that as a British citizen he is entitled to the national health system, while as a Muslim he had a claim to access his own ideas of healing, pain, suffering and cure. Rights today needs two circles of citizenship, an epidermis of universalism and an endodermis of cultural ecologies of competence and meaning. Diversity deserves this double guarantee for survival and creativity.

Yet the discourse on diversity also senses the incompleteness of rights, the necessity of mediating between property as an economic notion and culture as a guarantee of meaning. One needs a new set of mediating terms, taboos between the idea of intellectual property as a sacrosanct to current notions of invention and the idea of the commons. Rights without a notion of the commons leaves citizenship bereft in a time of crisis or enclosure.

Concepts like legacy, heritage, civilization, tradition suffer from ideas of inheritance of property. They demand a notion of commons, especially a notion of the knowledge commons where a craftsman or a nomad can survive along with an IT expert. A right to information is impoverished without a right to knowledge and wisdom. Pluralizing the commons of knowledge, nature, time becomes part of the new democratizing of diversity. Diversity has to be a label for the battles against the new enclosure movements of our time. One must emphasize that rights to an individual guarantees choice within a framework, but the idea of a commons develops the notion of alternatives, the availability of multiple frameworks, of alternative solutions that one needs today.

 

In fact, the battle between diversity and efficiency, productivity and sustainability, demands that diversity rethink the current economics of our time where rationality and cost-benefit analysis may not be the solution to the crises of our time. More than medicine, it is modern economics that is developing into a form of iatrogeny, of expert induced violence and illness. The challenge is to go beyond the current categories of economics. The dissenting works of Matthieu Ricard, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Jean-Pierre Dupuy might create openings for a new discourse on economics which dreams beyond development to a more culturally meaningful world. For example, a craft like weaving may be wished away as a sunset industry. But does one really call a livelihood that employs 13 million people obsolescent? Is a different narrative possible not only for the actual process of craftsmanship but also for the idea of craft as a heuristics?

Adil Hussain, the actor, in a recent speech on theatre observed quietly that TV has become a mass produced industry but theatre has retained the qualities of a craft. Theatre, he said, must keep its originality, its philosophical integrity. A friend suggested that a craft like theatre, to retain its heuristic form, should enter schools, hospitals where theatre as craft plays out new possibilities, while pedagogy and therapy acquires a new potency. Diversity does not watch over the dying of an idea. It seeks to adapt and invent new contexts for an idea. Imagine an experimental theatre group playfully outlining the surreal consequences of each policy as a continuous public performance.

The idea of craft and craftsmanship must become part of the trusteeship of each school, not as a supercilious hobby but as a deeper idea of the skills, the imagination that a sense of vocation needs. Our idea of professionalism is much too value free to create this sense of caring. Diversity is an experiment in a new ecology for ethics, an effort to rework the idea of caring to challenge the current limits of democracy and scholarship. Trusteeship as an ethics of responsibility creates a dialogue between obsolescence and sustainability. India as a civilization cannot let its ways of life, craft, nomadic or tribal, die or museumize.

 

Diversity needs a sense of empathy that goes beyond the frozen scripts of humanitarianism. These often suffer from disaster fatigue where disasters burden memory and produce a sense of space of indifference. One recollects the intuitive response of a tribal woman from Bastar who discovered with consternation that while her society suffered from starvation for seventy days, another society faced famine for 120. She promptly agreed to fast for another thirty as a statement of empathy, concern and solidarity.

The logic of diversity has to face the irony that one of the most lethal forms of diversity one confronts today in a Linnean sense is the varieties and inventiveness of violence. The inventiveness of contemporary violence is the ironic double that theories of plurality confront as they attempt to unravel the ethic of diversity.

 

One can visualize the violence confronting society today in terms in five concentric triangles, each frame emphasizing one level or genre of violence. The first frame emphasizes the violence on the body, as created by rape, incest, and torture. The second frame emphasizes the logic of the crowd as mob or as organized violence at the collective level exposed by lynching, rioting and terror. The third frame emphasizes the classic, almost historic, forms of violence embodied in tyranny, imperialism and development. The fourth frame is more technological; here, the power of technological innovation as obsolescence, erasure and triage, each of which combines violence with a potent form of forgetting. The fifth frame emphasizes collective disasters and destruction which can threaten the future of a species, namely extinction (the accelerated disappearance of species, either language, culture, or life), apocalypse (the sudden explosion of violence as in a nuclear attack) or as a genocide (the collective and systemic elimination of a people as in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Auschwitz or in Rwanda).

Diversity as a framework of inventive plural ethics confronts both the prospect and the aftermath of such events because diversity is both a theory of anticipation and the courage to rebuild on new principles after such violence. What are the new rules of ethical repair? What is the relation of memory to forgiveness and forgetting? How does one create new models of the social? How does one avoid the inevitable repetition of such events? These are the questions an ethic of diversity as an ethics of connectivity and heritage has to confront. Modern democracy stands virtually illiterate before this new frame of violence where the ideas of rights, security and sustainability have little to offer. The real challenge now is how does pluralism of culture create a new ethic of inventiveness?

 

We cannot offer solutions but we can begin with life giving assumptions that would seed more creative hypothesizes for the future.

1. We propose a revitalizing of the theories of memory so that the storyteller and the story do not disappear simultaneously.

2. An idea of trusteeship which articulates notions of responsibility and caring where the neighbourhood connects with the cosmos, where the local and planetary combine. Gandhi’s idea of swadeshi and swaraj as a connectivity of oceanic circles where the dewdrop resonates with the sea is one such gestalt.

3. A culture which articulates multiplicities of time and alternative histories between past and future.

4. A model of non-violence which challenges current notions of security and sustainability linking scientific truths to lived responsibilities.

5. A notion of citizenship as witness taking responsibility for the possible disappearance of the other. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 captures politically one aspect of such a trusteeship. As books are banned, each person becomes a book by memorizing it so that one becomes Hamlet, the other The Man Without Qualities, the third Ulysses. When books begin to disappear, the body is the living library of classic creativity.

6. A relook at the categories of economics, especially of efficiency, productivity and growth where rationality and efficiency do not yield to a socio-biology, a lifeboat ethics syndrome where those in the boat refuse to help those drowning.

7. A theory of ethics which combines the ethical and the political where ethics goes beyond honesty or punctuality to a notion of caring which can move from autobiography to collective politics.

8. All this should hopefully lead to a new democracy where difference possesses a deeper hermeneutics where emergence, otherness can be grasped as creative possibilities.

We have no League of Nations, no landmark treaty to offer, just an opening statement of the problem, its cosmic dimensions and a hope, a faith that such an invitation to an ethical experiment in diversity would help at least create a new commons of ideas for a democracy in crisis.

 

Within such a perspective, heritage is an act of trusteeship, a ritual of memory which keeps alive a monument, a text, a ritual, a city, and a seed as a way of life. Heritage needs to be defined in all its variegated senses. Heritage cannot be defined by materiality or textuality alone; it is a discourse, a way of preserving and conserving the past to make the present and future more meaningful. One needs a hermeneutics of heritage which goes beyond official definitions and current imagination. Given its complexity, it is better to define what heritage is not, to discover more clearly what heritage is.

 

Heritage in that sense is not an algorithm of the past but a hermeneutics of the future – a way of transmitting an exemplar movement of the past into a meaningful fable for the future. Whether as monument, text or seed, it unfolds through storytelling. Heritage is a way of keeping tradition alive rather than freezing or fundamentalizing it. When we say a seed is heritage, we include ways of life that sustain it and reproduce it. Heritage that fails to understand tradition breaks the social contract between past and present, where loss and mourning combine with a sense of renewal.

Heritage is a trusteeship that keeps the past alive in creative terms. In this sense we have to define heritage across the dualism of nature and culture. Nature is lived heritage, not wilderness where the emptiness of people creates a sacred monumentality about nature. Nature represents evolution and modern agriculture and farming in all its diversity. Nature as heritage is not a resource or a commodity, but a source of life, livelihood and wonder. In that sense heritage is not ownership, or an object beyond use, but a way of life and living. Nature/ culture mutually evolve to create the idea of heritage.

Nature cannot be seen instrumentally and functionally. Its beauty, diversity is its own logic and cannot be reduced to use value. Nature goes beyond use value, or exchange value to create a new value system rather than a valuation system. Nature as heritage needs accounting, accountability, and responsibility. One needs a sense of efficacy, a sense of sustainability and a sense of connectivity with other forms of life. In preserving nature, we assume responsibility for the vanity of ecosystems, without prioritizing any of them. Saving the last language or the last species of a form of life is an ethical responsibility not an act of cost-benefit analysis. One recognizes that the occasional extinction of species is a process of life but a forced extinction is a form of haemorrhaging that we can prevent.

 

Natural heritage thus demands an understanding of evolution and the realms of time it embraces. It demands a sense of Vavilov zones, the responsibility of a region linking up to the wider whole of the planet. Nature demands not just responsibility for forest but for agriculture, with a realization that agriculture keeps forms of life alive which would disappear without it. Traditional agriculture is thus something that needs to be surveyed as livelihood, as a knowledge system which created ways of life.

Heritage in that sense is responsibility for diversity, an understanding of its evolutionary logic. To save heritage is to understand the evolutionary logic of growth and innovation. Yet, it is not biology alone that saves natural heritage. Plants are symbolic, totemic, mythical, semiotic and thus apart from biology, the cultural dimension of plants caught in forms of cooking, as myth have to be sustained. Food is heritage which mediates between nature and culture which one owns up and celebrates the diversity of cuisines, the worlds of memory and the sensorium they create. Food is heritage and as invention, as innovation and as variety, it has to be sustained.

An ICOMOS committee for the future of food will be a critical move in accepting heritage as trusteeship. But it has to be an ICOMOS that talks to IUCN and UNESCO. Nature and culture have to appear in a dialogicity that is interdisciplinary and intercultural. Such a discourse cannot be conducted only in the language of science or the perspectives of the nation state. The civilizational and the vernacular have to hybridize in mutuality.

 

Heritage whether natural, material or symbolic has to be looked at as a new contract between past and future as mediated by the present. In that sense, what we need is not just an emphasis on materiality, the preservation of objects but a link to heuristics, epistemology that can be used to sustain the future. A semiotics of heritage becomes critical in that sense of context. So is a hermeneutics. One does not merely preserve the book. One preserves it by ways of reading and rereading the book. The hardware, and the software of the book have to simultaneously be sustained.

As far as heritage is concerned the grammar of nature/culture also links up to a sense of local and cosmopolitan, swaraj and swadeshi. One has to have sensitivities for the local, and the creativity of local. But one has to realize that the neighbourhood is part of the cosmos, the local is linked to the planetary. Sustainability and diversity are the intermediate languages which preserve this dialectic. In that sense the idea of heritage needs a theory of knowledge, and the plurality of cognitive systems where science and other forms of knowledge invent a new mutuality. This is not a plea for ethnoscience, or an instrumentalist plea for tribal medicines but a recognition that alternative epistemologies and ontologies are parts of heritage.

As early as 1923, India formulated a dialogue of medicines as a dialogue of cultural systems. The Secretary’s report on indigenous medicine will remain an exemplar for such a dialogue of plural systems as part of a new articulation of heritage as a trusteeship of knowledge systems. Diversity becomes the genetic code, the grammar for the preservation of systems of heritage. In preserving these systems we challenge the strip mining of a plant for drug, where plant and episteme disappear in the process of strip mining a culture.

The idea of heritage should be conceptually clear to be institutionally rewarding and ethically fruitful. The concept of heritage is thus not designed to preserve the past but also to protect a craft, a technology from obsolescence or triage in the future. Heritage is a ritual, a cybernetic check against obsolescence. It is a form of caring for the vulnerable and the defeated. A lifeboat ethics paradigm that eliminates the vulnerable, the old, the defeated merely articulates survival of the fittest.

 

Heritage is not a term, an isolate, but a demand for a paradigm that connects the ethics of trusteeship and caring to the aesthetics of plurality, where difference becomes critical for understanding and innovation. Here the theory of memory links to the theory of creativity to sustain the continuity of cultures. Present in such an ethics are:

a) A recognition of the other and the sense that no culture, no knowledge system is complete in itself.

b) A recognition that heritage challenges the impoverishment of time, where sustainability cannot be articulated in one language but has to be translated into a number of vernaculars.

c) A concept of social justice that needs a new social contract to define the mutuality of the oral, the textual and the digital.

d) Heritage also needs to go beyond the creativity of ordinary language to generate an idea of cognitive justice. It is a critical concept to adjudicate between past and present, articulated in the right of cognitive justice, the right of knowledge systems to exist in mutuality, linking lifestyle, livelihood and meaning systems of a people.

e) Heritage is not humanitarian, emphasizing the asymmetry between modernity and tradition, victorious and defeated, but a philosophy of caring, establishing the mutuality between the world lost and the present and future worlds. It has to be both social context and sacrament.

f) Heritage is a democratic search to foster creativity and justice, thus helping to sustain the power of the democratic imagination. It creates forms of trustee to sustain plurality, intergenerational justice, linking theories of memory and caring to theories of innovation. Heritage is a celebration of the idea of the commons and in that sense, it goes beyond possession of property.

g) Heritage has to be part of the trusteeship of a people, a part of the entitlements and responsibilities of citizenship. One has to initiate a peoples’ idea of heritage as a part of the theory of democracy. A citizen’s idea, vision of heritage becomes the critical starting point for this project. Citizens have to become custodians, trustees of heritage. Only then does heritage become a part of the democratic imagination. A democracy, without a proper sense of heritage is an act of lobotomy, amnesiacal in its sense of time and citizenship. Heritage thus becomes a new everyday term in the dynamics of our times. The storyteller and the theorist have to collaborate to create a new word anchored in a multiplicity of lifeworlds.

 

* This essay is a version of the lecture delivered at the ICOMOS Conference in December 2017. I would like to thank Gurmeet Rai for her comments.